Positivism

 

 

Thus, the 18th century in France. Mme de Tencin was an aristocrat, mother to d'Alembert, the Encyclopédiste who set the tone for the work, and contributed some 1700 articles, a lot of these in mathematics. The backstory is hard for us to appreciate: she abandonned her illegitimate child on the steps of a church; the father (duke of Arenberg) had him picked up and cared for in a home which he financed. She never had anything to do with the child - just ran a salon and wrote novels - and he succeeded brilliantly.

Noteworthy here that the advancement of the sciences which is such a motor to intellectual life includes progress in mathematics.

In the 19th century, we find the word positivism as such:

Auguste Comtes's advance for France - and the claim made in the name of philosophy - that society moves through a religious, then metaphysical and finally positive (scientific) stage cannot go unexamined.

It then becomes the work of 20th philosophy to create benchmarks for the issues here raised. That a great deal has been achieved in mathematics is undeniable. The respective place of logic, mathematics, and ordinary language are throughly examined. Logical positivism starting in 1920 and the Vienna Circle give the impetus to work in England through Russell at Cambridge, Carnap in Germany and the United States. Wittgenstein's early work is also influential at Oxford, which looks to ordinary language philosophy (Ayer), and the rejection of Cartesian dualism (body and mind) (Gilbert Ryle). And religion is ever in the background (Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent but raised as a catholic) while the English institutions remain protestant in culture and France embraces non- religious education.

If the legacy of positivism is to define a place for modern science within philosophy - no longer the natural philosophy of antiquity - it is at the cost of doing work in the philosophy of science. And the coup de grâce comes with an assault on what I like to think of as 'the slippers of philosophy' itself: the analytic-synthetic distinction, delivered by the American W. Quine.

So we are left with a myriad of highly productive sciences, social and physical; computers from all that work in logic; and an enduring if evermore challenging set of problems understanding the human situation.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/quine-an/